


Into the West

by ApathyandCookies



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-11 02:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7873123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApathyandCookies/pseuds/ApathyandCookies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An original story running parallel to The Stand. An evil from across the many worlds has dark plans for a world decimated by the Superflu. Together, several survivors must stand against it or watch what remains of their world crumble into darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. June 19th

"Just a little closer," Derek mumbled around the flashlight caught between his teeth.

Only the bottom half of the young man's body was completely visible. The other half was mostly swallowed up, consumed by the engine compartment of the small aircraft he was working on. With a ratchet in one hand and a bolt in the other, he struggled to replace the last of the mountings holding the brand new alternator inside his small Cessna 172. His entire body seesawed on the fuselage of the aircraft, his toes only occasionally touching the top step of the wooden stepladder he was using for his repairs.  
He finally managed to work the bolt into the mounting hole, causing him to grin around the flashlight protruding from his lips. Fitting the ratchet down over it, Derek slowly drove the bolt into its receptor, making quick movements back and forth as he worked the tool in the tight confines that the engine compartment allowed him.

It seemed though, every time he started ratcheting the bolt in, it would start crooked and he would have to back it out again, fearful of crossthreading the alternator mounting. He frowned; beads of sweat were starting to form on his forehead as the exertion was taking a toll on him. Well, the exertion and his inability to breathe properly in such a contorted position. He shifted forward, his heels coming up to behind his knees as he tried to get as close as he could to where he was working.

An older gentleman was watching all of this with a bemused smile on his face while leaning against the wide doorway of the sizable hangar. Floyd Wilks watched his son working on his plane, just as he had done when he was the same age. The number of years since that time was apparent in the lines on his face and the color of his hair; salt and pepper not all that long ago that had now gone way to mostly salt.

Floyd was terribly proud of the kid, now grunting and working his feet back and forth, all adding to the illusion that a carnivorous airplane was consuming him. He and his wife had their only child late in life, Floyd himself now being almost sixty-five. He saw things coming full circle for him. Now long retired, he watched his son grow into a man with the same love for aviation that he did. His son in his last few weeks before he would ship out to start basic training in the Air Force.

He wondered if Derek would enjoy the same long military career that he himself had, or would he just stay his six years and leave. It didn't matter all that much to Floyd. He just hoped that his son would be happy with his choice to follow in his footsteps. Either way, Floyd would be content.

Indeed, if there were any regrets that he had, it was that Floyd and his late wife, Tabitha, only had a single child before her untimely death from breast cancer when Derek was four years old. And possibly one other... Floyd was terrified of his long, slow descent into old age that would occur once his son was out of the house, leaving him alone – the house's sole inhabitant for the first time in almost forty years.

A loud whoop of delight broke Floyd out of his contemplation as his son successfully ratcheted that last bolt into place and immediately began extricating himself from the confines of the Cessna's engine compartment. Derek swung his feet back down, trying to use them as leverage as he pulled his upper half up and out of the plane. Too late though, he realized that both his feet were on the end of the ladder which immediately toppled from the instability.

Derek clawed at the aircraft but found his hands only grasping at air as he fell. In his mind, the five feet to the ground passed by in slow motion as he suddenly found himself face first on the concrete floor of the hangar, the smell of oil and dust in his nose that was now flattened against the unforgiving cement slab. He groaned as he rolled over to find his father right above him, grinning madly.

"One day you're going to break your neck, boy." Floyd Wilks said, extending his hand out for his son.

Derek groaned as he was helped to his feet, rubbing his now-throbbing forehead. He reached down and picked the stepladder up, folding it before gently leaning it against the fuselage of the aircraft. He felt his father's eyes on him as he went about closing and locking down the engine compartment on his plane.

Finally finished and satisfied that all was in order, Derek looked back over at his father. "I thought you were headed back home to start dinner?" He asked.

Floyd's big grin returned, sometimes that grin reminded Derek of the Cheshire Cat; illogically, he kept expecting that the rest of Floyd Wilks would simply fade into non-existence leaving only the grin behind in his place. The grin was his father's trademark and Derek, in his approaching adulthood, conveniently ignored the fact that he had that same hereditary smile.

Just when Derek was sure that the question was going to go unanswered, the grin faded a little, revealing a little bit of the anxiety and creeping loneliness that was behind it. "I don't know. I just figured that I would wait for you to finish up here and we could drive back into town together."

"What about my car?" Derek asked. "How am I going to get back here tomorrow?"

Floyd just waved his hand, dismissing the question. "Don't worry about it, I will bring you on back tomorrow. In the meantime, the car will be just fine, nobody is going to steal it."

That was certainly the truth. Derek drove a rolling trash-heap of a car. The old '92 Takuro Spirit had seen it's share of action. At times it seemed like it was one big rolling pile of Bondo and salvaged parts. This was fairly typical of Derek, he would rather have something old and falling apart that he could tinker with than something brand new that requires no work on his part to keep it functioning.

Derek finally smiled and nodded his acquiescence. Deep down he sensed that his father was having a far harder time accepting his looming departure for his own career and whatever was lying beyond than what he was really letting on. So he took whatever chance he had to spend extra time with his father. And true to form, neither of them really talked about it.

Sitting inside the big Cadillac that was a huge contrast from his own car, Derek stared out the side window. He watched his own reflection superimposed on the scenery as is rolled silently past. The trees in Kent, Ohio were a dark and vivid green, the sign that spring had given up its last breaths as summer had stepped in to take its place. The day itself was warm. Warm and humid. Not a good sign this early in the season. It almost assuredly meant that it would be absolutely unbearable come mid-summer.  
Both father and son rode on toward home in an almost uncomfortable silence, but it was Floyd that first decided to break it. “What does Amanda think of you going on into the Air Force next month?” Floyd asked. “You haven't really mentioned anything about it.”

Derek shrugged, an action that looked much more self-conscious than he would have liked it to. "I don't know dad. We get along fine. We are just as good as we always have been. She says she's totally cool with the whole military thing, but I know that she doesn't want me to go. I guess I just am worried about what's going to happen between us after I'm gone."

Derek sighed and shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. "I don't know dad. I guess everyone, us included halve always just assumed Amanda and I would get married, you know?"

Floyd knew. His son and his next-door neighbor's daughter had been inseparable as children and that friendship had flourished into their teenage years where they spent their entire high school existence romantically involved. But now, just as spring has passed on into summer, the two kids (Floyd did and probably always would think of them as kids) were starting to pass away into a sobering and unforgivingly realistic early adulthood, just as casually and inevitably as the seasons changed.

Time is unforgiving, this Floyd knew. He could see the childhood of his son zip by him like a movie played at double or triple speed. And here at the end he felt cheated. No matter how much he tried to make each moment leading up until now count, it didn't prevent it from being over.

"I know" Floyd finally said. "The only thing that I can tell you is…just do whatever will make you happy. That girl's got a good head on her shoulders, and so do you. If it's meant to be, the two of you will figure out a way to make it work." 

Derek didn't reply, but instead kept looking out the window at the encroaching summertime.

The evening passed in a companionable silence. The two cooked dinner on the grill outside, a couple of mammoth sirloin steaks grilled medium rare, and then ate outside in the fading daylight. They didn't speak any more of the future, but only about the inconsequential; the weather and the summertime, and whether old mister Harmon across the street would stay in the house after his wife had died a few weeks past.

Their conversation circled in, as always, on aviation and soaring in a clear blue sky.

Derek Wilks certainly took after his father, and his grandfather for that matter, when it came to his love of flying. Floyd had his son in a cockpit ever since he was barely old enough to walk. Derek could fly a plane before he could drive a car, or even ride a bike for that matter. And here at seventeen years old, he had already had his pilot's license for a couple years now.

Floyd had related to Derek, as he already had a dozen times by now, his plans to fly south and explore the Caribbean islands for a few months after his son had gone to the military. He would never do this, Derek knew, because there were literally hundreds of grand aspirations that his father had always talked about doing and yet never really got around to. No, he was certain, Floyd would simply remain in the house and think of all the things that he should be doing and yet never get the initiative, or the courage, to get out and do.

This bothered Derek, but he could not and would not allow his father's depression and loneliness to prevent him from getting started with his life. And even if he wanted to, there was no way his father would ever allow it.

Their silence was finally broken near the end of their meal as a young blond woman came around the house into the back yard and encircled her arms around Derek, giving him a kiss on the cheek. Floyd stood up and began gathering dishes, busying himself as his son's long time girlfriend arrived.

"I'm going to head on in and clean up." He said, giving a knowing smile and an imperceptible wink to Amanda as he went inside.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Floyd sat in his armchair, doing the crossword puzzle out of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and only peripherally listening to the eleven o'clock news as he heard the back screen door slam shut. Derek had been outside with Amanda for over three hours. Floyd had seen them out the kitchen window as he was doing the dishes. At first they seemed angry and standoffish with each other but by the time he turned off the light and headed to the living room, all appeared to be well as they stood in the back yard, embracing each other. Floyd very much hoped that it was. He had known Amanda and her parents for a long time and he didn't want to see the girl get hurt.

His son came in and sat down on the couch, putting his feet up on the table as he became engrossed with what was on the news. Floyd watched him for a few minutes before his curiosity finally got the better of him. "Everything okay?" He asked.

"Shh dad, I'm listening to this." Derek said, causing Floyd to direct his attention to the television set.

The news was reporting a quarantine of some pissant town in Texas. A talking head from the CDC was busily feeding his press conference their daily dose of the "don't worries". The story peaked his interest somewhat. He had recalled a few times in the past that quarantines had been imposed, but not within the last few decades, and definitely not in the generation of television news jackals that will tell you anything you could possibly want to know, as long as it involves death and/or tragedy.

Floyd waited for the story to be over so he could find out the news that he was genuinely interested in. And finally, as the news went to commercial, Derek turned back around to look at his father.

"Is everything okay?" Floyd said, reiterating the question.

Derek smiled and shrugged "Everything's fine, why do you ask?"

This always aggravated Floyd, his son knew damn well what he wanted to know, but was going to force him to unearth each little piece of information like a dentist pulling teeth.

"What's happening with you and your honey?" Floyd finally asked.

"Oh, I think we are going to be okay." Derek said, refocusing his attention to the television.

Floyd nodded, still not happy with the clarity of the information being communicated by his only son. "Really, so she's going to be okay with you being away for a while?"

"Nah, one better than that." Derek said, not turning away from the television, not allowing his father to see the smile on his face. "She's going to marry me."

The elder Wilks opened his mouth, closed it, the opened it again as his son turned to face him, smiling. It gave him the rather comical expression of a fish on dry land trying in vain to draw in oxygen. Finally he managed to regain enough composure to talk in a strangled voice about one octave high than his normal boom, making his sound hilariously like Foghorn Leghorn. "Boy, are you... Are you telling me that you two have been out there for three hours making wedding plans and neither one of you bothered to come in here and tell me about it?" He asked, incredulously.

Derek laughed and shook his head. "Nah, dad. We have only been making plans for about the last two hours, it took me the first hour or so to get up the nerve to ask her. And…" Derek added, grinning mischievously "…to make sure that you weren't at the window watching us when I gave her the ring."

Floyd tried to search for something to say. Finally what came out seemed dazed, almost stupid to his ears. "And she said yes?" he asked.

"Yeah, dad." Derek replied patiently "She said yes."

The older man just sat in his chair, staring at, but not really watching the television, trying to process all of the new information that he suddenly found himself assaulted with. An idea suddenly occurred to him: "Amanda isn't pregnant is she?" Floyd asked, suspiciously.

Derek flushed, rolling his eyes. "No dad, she's not pregnant."

Nodding, Floyd smiled. "Why don't you tell Amanda to come on out here, I want to congratulate her."

Derek looked both shocked and uncomprehending at the same time. "How did you know…" He mouth, barely making a noise.

"Don't you think that I know every single creak of the floorboards in this old house? You think I don't know when someone is standing in my dining room?" Floyd said. He was obviously relishing the revenge he was getting on his son for putting one over on him.  
However, before Derek had a chance to reply, Amanda came out from the dining room, smiling meekly with her hands folded in front of her. She looked immediately both nervous and apologetic.

Floyd stood up, smiling at the blossoming young woman who he had known since she barely came up to his waist. "Come on over here, sweetheart" he said, holding his arms open for her.

The girl came over and he embraced her tightly, she readily returned the hug. "I'm really happy for both of you" Floyd said, smiling at his son over the shoulder of his soon to be daughter-in-law.

Lying in bed that night, Floyd found that no matter what he did, sleep was simply not going to come to him. He was alone in the house. He had heard his son slip out the back door a few hours earlier. The boy was good at knowing the right places to step to keep the floor from squeaking, but not so good that he didn't slip up at least once on his way out. There wasn't really any doubt where Derek had gone. He was obviously next-door at Amanda's house, her parents being out of the state on vacation of a couple weeks.

He stared out the curtainless window, the moonlight streaming in and illuminating a large misshapen trapezoid right in the middle of his bed. Floyd was far more permissive with the kids seeing each other whenever they wanted to than Amanda's own parents were. He knew that they had been sexually active with each other since about the time they were fifteen and while he had, at the time, been somewhat angry about it, there really wasn't any point in making their lives difficult after the cat was out of the bag, so to speak.

Stupid decisions were a hallmark of youth. Of this, Floyd was certain, even though his own youth was now far behind him. However, Derek was far more responsible in his own youth than he had ever been. This is why Floyd very rarely gave him grief for any but the most serious of transgressions. This was not to say that Floyd felt that his son being engaged to Amanda was a bad idea, quite the opposite. Floyd felt that the young lady next door was the most perfect girl for Derek. He would even go so far as saying "soul mates".

The Turner family had moved into the house next door when both their daughter and Derek were six years old. They had invited the two of them over to a barbecue the following weekend. Floyd very clearly remembered the slight, tiny blond girl cannonball into the aboveground pool, her narrow frame sending up pitiful splashes of water. Derek timidly went to go say hello to her, and they had been best friends from that day forward.

Times had not been perfect for them ever since. Both had to endure their own snares and pitfalls of adolescence and puberty. Floyd could recall mediating no small number of petty squabbles between the two of them. But against the odds, both of them came out on the other side intact.

Life was good for right this moment, and tomorrow would tend to itself. This was Floyd's last, resolute thought as he got out of bed and walked downstairs to make coffee.


	2. June 20th

The morning sunlight glinted off the surface of the pond, giving it the appearance of an immense pool of molten copper. The illusion was only broken by a flat river rock skipping several times across the surface of the water, leaving widening concentric circles on it's surface spreading out and away from the impacts. Just as the calm would almost return to the pond, another stone would go skipping across it, then another, and another.

Sitting beside a stand of reeds at the side of the pond was a young man, barely a couple years into his teens, cross-legged at the edge of the water with a considerable pile of skipping stones gathered beside him. Pratt Lake was really only a lake by name. The same effect could easily have been gained by gathering a couple dozen family swimming pools around each other. Occasionally, if there was an extremely hot or dry summer, the lake might disappear completely for between a few days and a few weeks.

In fact, the only real saving grace to this little pool on the outskirts of Pratt, Tennessee is that it made a pretty damn good swimming hole. The town itself was off in the middle of nowhere, underneath the shadow of the Smoky Mountains. This mountain in particular was known affectionately to the local residents as Little Bear Peak. Only a single road led into or out of the town, with a fifteen-mile trip to the larger town of Kingston.

Only thirty or so houses made up the little town of Pratt and aside from a single old gas station, you had to drive out of town to get anything. This is probably why the lake was so popular amongst the teenagers living in town. Its seclusion made it an excellent place to be drunk, intimate or basically do anything where the interference of parents was deemed inconvenient. Conversely, if parents wanted to go make sure that their kids weren't doing anything that they weren't supposed to be, they eventually found their way down to Pratt Lake.

However, this morning only a single teenager was down along the shores of the pond. Andrew Verner wouldn't have it any other way, he tended to stay away from this place when anyone else was around, preferring to come down here to daydream and skip stones across the water's surface. Partially he did this because he enjoyed the seclusion. Partially he did this because he really just didn't have any friends here in Pratt.

While he did have a few friends at the high school in Kingston, he was generally an outcast here at his home. Aside from his shyness, he didn't understand why everyone seemed to dislike him so much. He went to great pains to make sure that he didn't look any different or stand out any more or less than anyone else. He had even gone to the extent of getting rid of his glasses in favor of contact lenses, but still to no avail. Perhaps it was just, Andy supposed, that it was far easier to acquire a label than it was to be rid of it.

And so here Andy found himself, in his second week of what was panning out to be a very long, and very boring summer vacation here along the banks of the Pratt in what was assuredly as far out in the sticks as you could possibly live without needing helicopter supply drops. He could imagine far better things he would like to be doing, but he was stuck here and as Bill Murray had put it, "That's the fact, Jack."

His time there beside the lake was unfortunately short this morning as another of Pratt's teenage population stumbled across him.

"Oh Christ, what the hell are you doing here you fucking loser?" The words came from behind him, dripping with vitriol.

Andy turned around to see the girl that was the bane of his entire existence, Samantha Mackenzie. Andy could clearly remember a kind and compassionate little girl that he had grown up with who lived just a few houses down from him. He remembered playing with her and although he wouldn't admit so, having an enormous crush on her. But unfortunately, the teenage years interceded and the girl that was once his friend was now the teenager that seemed so intent on making him as miserable and unhappy as she possibly could.

It always seemed that Samantha was trying her hardest to put him in his place, as she saw it. Whenever Andy started to make friends with anyone, Samantha spread rumors to make him miserable. Whenever Andy, God forbid, started to show interest in any girl at good 'ol Kingston High School, Samantha would turn that girl into a pariah if she so much as dared be friends with him. He had busted his brain for hours to figure out exactly what he had done to turn her against him and always come up empty in that search.

To Andy, he had every bit as much of a hard time understanding Samantha's popularity as he did understanding his own lack thereof. She had brown hair down to just below her shoulders, blue eyes and was covered head to toe in dense freckles – something that he knew she was self conscious of but would never make fun of her over it, not being willing to hurt her the way that she hurt him. All in all, she was definitely pretty (Andy thought), but she wasn't drop-dead gorgeous. She was caustic and often very mean-spirited, and rarely nice to anyone outside of her own little clique (many of which received runners-up positions in making Andy's life hell), and yet somehow she was one of the most popular girls in school.

And here she was, standing behind him, giving him a look that made him feel like an insect. "Why don't you get the fuck out of here and go jerk off, or whatever you do in your house all day." She said, her lip curling into a sneer as Andy turned around to look at her sheepishly.

"What's it to you?" Andy asked, detesting the way that his voice sounded pinched and nervous.

Samantha's face twisted into a slim smile of satisfaction. She had intimidated him and she knew it. "We are going swimming and we don't want your faggot ass around here." She replied, every word conveyed that his very existence on this earth offended her.  
Andy looked up and was dismayed to see four more of Sam's friends walking down the path in the direction of the lake. Whatever emotional wounds Samantha was able to do to him, it would be far worse if four of her friends joined into putting him down and unleashing their combined hatred upon him. He decided immediately that he'd rather look like a coward than to stay there and be bullied by them.

So Andy slowly stood up and walked away without making eye contact with his onetime friend. He didn't walk down the path. Hell no, he didn't want to have pass through the gauntlet of the other angst-filled teenagers that saw him as the community whipping boy. Instead he decided to walk directly into the forest that was at the base of the mountain. He figured he would walk through there for a while and then cut sideways back onto the road – whatever it took to avoid any more of a confrontation today.

Samantha wasn't about to allow that though. She continued heaping abuse on him as he walked away, making him feel very much like a dog skulking away with it's tail between it's legs. As he walked off into the trees he heard the whistle as one of his skipping stones came close enough to his head for him to feel the wind of it's passing. This got his attention enough for him to turn around. For the first time there was hurt in his eyes as he looked at Samantha for a moment before turning back to the woods. If there was any kind of compassion in her own, he was unable to see it.

"There's one of your skipping stones, pussy." She yelled after him. He continued walking further and further into the woods until her jeers grew quieter and finally stopped altogether.

Andy stayed in the woods for a while. He hadn't intended to linger after he had been evicted from his spot at the shoreline, but something still kept him in the woods. He sat on a rock for a long time, lost in thought, listening to the sound of the splashing and the horseplay coming from yonder lake. Finally, after a half hour or so he stood up and carefully crept toward the lake again.

When he got close enough to make out what was happening at the pond, he crouched down behind some bushes, just watching. He could see the assembled swimmers, all teens roughly his own age, having fun in the water splashing at each other and swimming about the sun-warmed water.

He saw the Queen Bitch herself in a red bikini that left remarkably little to the imagination, she was in the embrace a boy – Kevin his name was. She was laughing and chatting lightly, a far cry from her attitude toward Andy just short time earlier. He would occasionally lean in and plant kisses on her neck, she would accept these with a giggle, but the couple times he reached down to cup her red cloth-clad behind in his hands, she would swat his hands away and whisper something to him.

Andy could feel a swell of jealousy watching all of this, although he couldn't put his finger on its exact source. Was it jealousy toward the guy with Samantha? Almost assuredly not. Maybe it was just jealousy at them having so much fun with each other and he was never allowed to be a part of it. As much as he hated to admit it, even to himself, Andy was pretty sure that this was exactly what was upsetting him.

Part of him just wanted to run out there and start yelling. Part of him wanted to ask what about him wasn't good enough to be part of their shitty group.

He never did, though, regardless of how much he wanted to. Instead he watched in silence for a little bit longer and then turned away and crept quietly away from the water and back into the trees. He was angry and hurt all at the same time. It never really occurred to him that there might not be anything wrong with him and that sometimes, teenagers especially, just needed someone to be their pariah – and Andy Verner happened to draw Pratt, Tennessee's short straw in that regard.

Andy found his way home, physically and emotionally drained after a long walk through the woods that he had never really intended to take. After leaving the lake he just started walking through the trees and then through the pathways that crisscrossed the bottom of the mountain. He wasn't really thinking of anything, just trying to do anything that he could to wear himself out in both mind and body. He mostly succeeded, and by the time he had arrived at his back door the pain and torment he was under had been dulled away to the point that he simply felt numb.

His house was a pigsty as usual; paper plates and beer bottles littered every available surface. There was no good to be had in complaining about it. "Sorry Andy, the maid called in sick today" was his mother's usual response to the continual disarray of the Verner household. He kicked his tennis shoes off at the door and wandered through the living room. Amy Verner had brought home some guy from whatever bar in Kingston she had gone to last night, and that meant she probably wouldn't even wake up until two or three in the afternoon.

Andy recalled the guy when they had both stumbled in last night. He was a scruffy looking wreck of a man with bad teeth, but then again all of his mom's one-night stands had bad teeth. The thing that really struck him though was his absolutely obnoxious mule-bray of a laugh. From Andy's bedroom at the other end of the hall he could hear it.

HEE-HAW, HEE HAW!

It made him absolutely crazy. He fell asleep with his headphones on, just any kind of noise to drown out that fool laugh. There apparently wasn't any escaping the hell that his life was even when he was at home. It was like everyone was playing a sick joke on him sometimes. It was like he got a phone call at some point; "This is the school of hard knocks calling. I'm really sorry to tell you that you are a loser and your mom's a slut. Tough break, Andy-boy."

As Andy walked down the hall, he could hear two sets of loud snores coming from his mom's bedroom. He listened for a moment and then continued on down the hall to his own room. He got inside and quietly latched the door before flopping down onto his bed and putting his headphones on. Right now all he wanted to do was to go to sleep and pretend that that when he woke up he would be starting this turd of a day over.

He pressed the power button and lay back, closing his eyes as he listened to a new song by some guy he never heard of blaring out over the radio.

Baby can you dig your man?  
He's a righteous man.

It was an okay song. It kind of sounded a little bit like second rate Justin Bieber shit. Nothing he would rush out and buy the album over, but it was okay enough to listen to just to pass the time. Life isn't always fair, that was a truth that Andy was facing on a daily basis. But again, as Bill Murray said, "That's the fact, Jack."


	3. Chapter 3

At about the same time that young Andrew Verner was having abuse heaped upon him by his unpleasant childhood crush, Floyd Wilks, sporting an old worn pair of coveralls and a big straw hat, was outside in his back yard furiously tearing weeds out of his garden with a rake. He was humming softly as he did so along with an old, almost antiquated transistor radio sitting on the grass, its antenna glinting off the light of the late morning sun. A couple hours earlier his son and soon to be daughter-in-law took his Caddy and headed to the mall in Akron, they wanted to go have breakfast together and then begin planning their wedding. They graciously invited Floyd to come along. He declined the invitation, saying he didn't want to intrude. And besides, his disaster of a garden needed some work anyway.

Truth be told, Floyd hated gardening. He didn't like getting his hands dirty. He didn't like rough and sweaty work. And most of all, he didn't like vegetables. All the same, he was reasonably sure that being both southern and old, he was required to grow things in the ground and (usually) pawn them off on the neighbors. Corn, squash, carrots, green beans and cucumbers were all laid out in orderly little rows. The cucumbers weren't doing so hot this year, but everything else was flourishing. The corn Floyd ate readily, but everything else he gave as wide a berth as possible.

Winded, He stripped off his work gloves and leaned his rake against the maple tree running up beside the garage. He sat down on a short brick wall that surrounded the garden, a wall that he built with his own hands about ten years previous. A glass of ice water was sitting there on the wall, waiting for him. Condensation was heavy on the glass, drops of water dripping down it's sides to be absorbed greedily by the dry bricks that it was setting on.

After draining off almost half of the glass in one long gulp, Floyd exhaled deeply and turned his attention to the sound of the radio. The news reporter sounded thin and tinny over the old radio. It was the same old thing every time he checked on the news last night or this morning. East Texas was the first item on the docket. "…And the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia reported this morning that there is no cause for alarm concerning the quarantine of Arnette, Texas. Doctor Herbert Denninger of the CDC stated, in a morning press conference, that the containment of a strain of the influenza virus has been successful and that it will not be necessary to evacuate or quarantine the surrounding areas - although he declined to comment on when the quarantine will be lifted. In other news…"

Floyd wrinkled his nose distastefully. Nothing was quite as bad as a really nasty case of the flu bug during the summertime. He figured that it might not be such a bad idea to go into the doctor this week or the next and get himself a flu shot. After all, he wasn't getting any younger and a case of the flu at his age wasn't a joke. He had an air show coming up in a couple weeks that he would be flying in, and piloting a stunt plane with a head cold wasn't a very good idea. He might be getting up there in years, but he didn't have any intention of dying this month.

He considered that he should probably get down to the hangar today and start getting his plane ready for the show, but discarded the idea. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow. He didn't need to get started on that for at least another week or so. In the meantime he had his much-hated garden to deal with, he thought sourly.

A cluster of cheerful little beeps from the flip phone atop the radio gave him the little excuse that he needed to set aside his agricultural aspirations for a little bit. He answered the cell phone, the cheapest and least complicated one he could find, to the pleasant voice of Amanda's mother, Faye. Her and her husband had gone to Hawaii for a week, as they did pretty much every summer, leaving their daughter at home under the mild supervision of Floyd. Faye called her house every day at about this time, and if she couldn't reach her daughter she would call here to make sure that everything was okay. This whole procedure had been repeated so many times throughout Amanda's teenage years that is had long since become routine.

For a moment Floyd had considered telling his neighbor about their children's planned nuptials, but quickly changed his mind. That information wasn't his to tell and she would find out from Amanda pretty quickly anyway. Instead he listened to the woman bantering on about what they were doing, things he had all heard before. Then she told him, as she already had at least a dozen times prior, that they would be home first thing in the morning on the 24th. Floyd took this all in politely and added that he hoped they had a good time and then hung up the phone.

Floyd lifted the brim of his hat and looked up at the sky. A stiff breeze was starting to blow, and some storm clouds off in the distance were threatening to bring an end to his exquisitely perfect morning. We could use the rain, he told himself. Floyd decided that he might find himself down at the airstrip today working on his plane, after all.

Amanda's parents were not going to be as happy about the marriage as he himself was, that was without question. Floyd thought (and if he asked, Amanda would confirm it) that Amanda's parents were more than a little bit disappointed with her. They were both professionals. Thomas Turner (Gah, Floyd thought, even the name sounded pretentious) was an attorney for some real estate company in Cleveland, and Faye Turner was an accountant for the city of Kent. Both of them seemed to be more than a little bit put off by their daughter who, while still planning on going to college, had no further ambitions in life other than just being a wife and a mother.

Floyd certainly empathized with his son's girlfriend on this one. He never really understood people whose entire lives seemed to revolve around the acquisition of "stuff." He himself was not so much rich as he was thrifty, and didn't really care to be. His only real extravagances in life was his two planes and the five year old Cadillac. Aside from that, he really did not regret the fact that he couldn't take vacations like the Turner family could, or buy expensive cars every year like they could.

Life was about doing what it takes to make yourself and those you love happy, the adage that "whoever dies with the most toys wins" was absolute bullshit. Floyd knew that, he watched all of his siblings fall victim to the lures of rampant consumerism. He was sure that there was no greater proof of society's gluttony that his brother's "need" for a recreational vehicle with a price tag higher than what Floyd's house was worth. Amanda though, she already understood that all the money in the world couldn't buy happiness, and she was going to live her life accordingly. Floyd was very proud of the girl.

The wedding also, they were probably going to frown on. The kids had already made obvious to Floyd that they were intending to get married within the next few weeks. It would be a small and intimate service and reception. They were figuring on inviting maybe thirty or forty people from each family – just close relatives and friends. Without knowing for sure, it seems to Floyd that the Turners – with all of their other little traditions and rituals – would be more than a little bit put out that their only daughter was not going to have a large traditional wedding - which would undoubtedly be more an outlet for them to show off than it would be a benefit for the kids.

He hoped that they would get over it as quickly as possible and just be happy for their child. What makes them enjoy their lives wasn't necessarily the same thing that would make their daughter, or Floyd's son for that matter, happy. If they didn't like it, too damn bad because (as Andy Verner could have told them) life isn't always fair and sometimes you just need to suck it up and deal with it.

Draining off the last of his glass of water, Floyd slowly stood up, his joints creaking. Giving one last baleful look at his garden, he turned and started walking toward the house while thinking that if nothing else, the next few weeks were going to be extremely interesting.


	4. Chapter 4

Barefoot, a black teenager sat down on the only piece of furniture in the room; a long padded bench that seemed intended for either sleeping or sitting, uncomfortably. The officer that just arrested the sixteen-year-old closed the heavy steel door and locked the dead bolt with an audible snap. Like an old friend, Neil Dawes once again found himself enjoying the dubious hospitality of the juvenile holding room at the Oak Valley Police Station in Oak Valley, Maryland.

Indeed, it would be hard to believe that there was any place that better suited the tastes of the discriminating underage petty criminal than the old OVPD could. With its four bare white walls, colorless bench, and the smell of what must be gallons of Clorox bleach that was used to disinfect the room daily, nobody could say that this place wasn't a treat for an upstanding young man like mister Dawes on each of his numerous visits to these particular accommodations.

He quickly noted that someone had somehow smuggled a pen into the room since his last visit. That particular wit had written "Todd Peterson sux dick!" on the wall behind the bench and then below it drew a fascinating little caricature of one stick figure performing fellatio on another stick figure. Neil believed he could narrow down the artist to one of two people; both his own age and both of them enjoyed the hospitality of the Oak Valley Police juvenile holding room every bit as often as he did, maybe more.  
By his best estimates, he would be there for at least another four hours. Neither of his parents got off work until five o'clock and both of them had long since stopped disrupting their daily routine just for something as common as the police informing them that they had their son in custody, again. No, they would instead let him stew in this room for the rest of the day and pick him up, after signing all the necessary documents and agreeing to appear in juvenile court, on their way home.

Perhaps we have already drawn certain speculations as to the background and lifestyle of Neil Dawes and his family, so let us dispel them now. Neil Dawes doesn't come from a bad neighborhood, his parents are not divorced nor is his father abusive. There are no drugs in the Dawes household, nor is there any alcohol, not so much as an occasional beer. In fact, Neil's parents are extremely well off. ("Getting ahead" as Neil's father Nathaniel might have said.)

As the sole African-American family in the exclusively white neighborhood of Oak Valley, the Dawes' hadn't had the easiest time being accepted and this was made all the more problematic with Neil's seeming inability to stay out of trouble. Quite often they pointed out that it "wasn't his fault". Which, in a way, was the absolute truth. From the very beginning, Neil struggled to be accepted in his new neighborhood and his new school. However, had Mister and Missus Dawes known who their son would find acceptance with, they might have decided to move somewhere else.

Within a month of moving in, their son had already been arrested twice. He spent most of his time hanging around with three boys, the ringleader being Billy Hayes, the son of the county sheriff. The three other boys had a rudimentary cunning that allowed them to instinctively get their way out of most of their run-ins with the law. Neil however, was generally pretty guileless and it was a foregone conclusion that whatever trouble the four of them got it, Neil Dawes would somehow end up the one blamed.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

The day started fairly normal for Neil. With school out now he decided to spend the morning watching television and playing video games. He woke up, as he normally did, with the dawn. He stayed in bed though, pretending to be asleep, until his parents left for work – No early morning discussion with his parents ever seemed to end well. And since he wanted this to be a good day, he decided just to not to allow himself to be noticed.

Once his parents were out the door, he finally got up and around. After showering and eating breakfast he settled into, what he had thought would be, a long and uneventful day of doing absolutely nothing.

Neil was sitting in front of the television, peripherally listening to some reality show shit while he fiddled with some random game he downloaded onto his cellphone, trying to figure out why it wasn't functioning properly when the doorbell rang. He got up and checked to see who it was and was both gladdened and disheartened to find his friend (and one of the two suspected artists who decorated the wall he was currently leaning against) Billy Hayes, standing at the door.

"Hey, man" Neil said. "Come on in, I'm just hanging out and watching TV."

Neil ushered his friend in. He was happy that his two younger sisters, Ayja and Korin, weren't home. Neither of them cared much for Will, as though they both sensed his general untrustworthiness and his propensity for leaving trouble in his wake wherever he went. More than this, Neil was more than a little bit ashamed at the quality of the friends he had made here in Oak Valley even though he would never admit to that.

They sat and watched television for a while, but all the time Neil could sense the growing restlessness in his friend. "Neil, let's get out of here and go do something." Bill finally said.

This was the thing that Neil was really hoping that he wouldn't hear out of his friend's mouth. "Let's go do something" almost always meant, "Let's go cause some trouble."

"What do you want to do?" Neil asked.

Billy shrugged and stood up, putting his shoes back on. (Shoes were not allowed on the Dawes family's pristine white carpets, no sir.) "Hurry up" he yelled at Neil, who was hopping around on one foot, attempting to get his shoes on. They got out the door and onto their bikes. The crisp, slightly acrid ocean air was blowing up from the shoreline slightly chilling the boys as they walked outside, despite the sunlight.

As they slowly pedaled their way back up the hill from the beachfront and into town Neil was, for a while anyway, lulled into believing that that might not actually get into any serious trouble today.

"You know that girl, Cindy Keller?" Billy asked with a mean-spirited glint was in his eye. This particular glint usually only surfaced when he was talking about fighting or sex, on this occasion it was the latter.

"Yep" Neil replied. He knew her; Cindy Keller was a girl that moved here during the last few weeks of school. She was a tiny little redheaded girl; a sophomore, he was pretty sure. He had chatted with her once or twice before school ended and thought that she was pretty nice. And although he had seen her around town in the couple weeks since then, he hadn't said anything to her.

"She lives just a few house down from me." Billy said, there was the mean-spirited glint again. "I'm 'so' going to hit that."

"You aren't going to hit shit." Neil said. He knew that in the mind of Bill Hayes, Bill was the ultimate god of virility. But it was definitely only in his mind. It was laughable that a girl as pretty as Cindy was would even look twice at the likes of his friend.  
To start with, Will had a major case of what Neil's sisters would call "pizza face." Colonies of oozing pimples made their way across his face, from his chin all the way up to his forehead. He was overweight with thick jowls and eyes that were too small for his head, the effect made him look almost surreally like a not-too-bright pit bull. It was obvious that when the acne problem did clear up, one day, he would instead be adorned with scars left behind from their presence on top of his already unfortunate looks.  
Even if you could overlook the distastefully grim exterior, William Hayes made sure that what you uncovered beneath that wasn't any great improvement. He was abrasive and narcissistic. He spent an unusually large amount of time bragging about his promiscuity to his friends – boasts that anyone with half a brain recognized as being patently false.

Worse, when he got angry he became violent and always kept a knife in his pocket. Although he had never stabbed anyone with it, he had made threats and he talked a great deal about wanting to kill someone. We would be relieved to know that our new acquaintance, Neil Dawson, had more than once seriously questioned the mental stability of his friend.

The two of them rode on until they reached the main drag. Without coming to a complete stop, Billy jumped off of his bike and dropped it onto its side right in front of the Seven-Eleven. The store was a garish sneer of colors that looked jarringly out of place in this quaint and tastefully upper-class piece of New England. Neil brought his own bike to a stop and sensibly dropped down the kickstand, parking it neatly and unobtrusively beside the plate glass windows of the store.

They went inside. Neil immediately knew exactly what was expected out of him, even if no words were exchanged in the matter. He walked up to the counter and picked up a pack of gum and started to chat casually with the clerk as it was rung up. The clerk, white of course, was giving him a look of distaste. Just once Neil would have liked to be looked at by the fine citizens of Oak Valley like he wasn't at their front door trying to sell them magazine subscriptions... or worse.

But at this point, keeping the clerk busy was Neil's primary action item. If the clerk was busy thinking about how much he wished the young black man in his store would get out, he wouldn't be paying attention to the fine mister Hayes who was busily stuffing cans of Miller Highlife into the oversized pockets of his khakis.

"Thank you, sir!" Neil said, smiling ingenuously as he walked out of the store, a few seconds after Billy did.

The two of them left and got on their bikes, neither of them daring to do something as suspicious as look behind them back into the store to see how carefully the store clerk was scrutinizing them. Had they done so, they would have seen the gentleman pick up the phone and dial the police. Had they seen this, they almost definitely wouldn't have gone to the park. Had they not gone to the park, Neil would almost definitely not be currently cooling his feet in the Oak Valley PD's star accommodations and sucking up the fragrant smell of chlorine bleach.

The park was mostly empty when they got there. A few kids and their mothers were off by the playground, and an elderly couple was walking down the path running through the middle. (The meandering path, because nothing simulates a gen-u-ine path through the forest like a curving concrete sidewalk.) Aside from that, they were alone. The two of them sat down on the bench and broke out the two 40-ounce cans of malt liquor from Bill's gigantic pockets.

"I was figuring…" Neil said as he let out a ripping belch. "I was figuring, maybe we could grab Alex and go down to the beach tomorrow. You know, just get the hell out of this place for a little while."

"Fuck that. The beach is boring. Why don't you take your sisters there, the three of you can braid each other's hair." Billy sneered, laughing heartily at his own weak attempt at humor.

Probably wisely, Neil decided just to let it go and not say any more. He was already aware that Will was most like devising plans for tomorrow inside his own head. And it was almost certain that whatever plans he had in mind were far more likely to get them into trouble than a day at the beach would. A moment later, the point was made moot when he spied someone that he knew over by the park restrooms.

Billy jumped up and set his beer back down on the bench. "I'll be right back, dude. I know that guy, I'm going to go see if maybe I can score us some shit."

He ran off in the direction of the restrooms. By "shit", Bill probably meant weed… at least that's what Neil was hoping he meant. He had very little doubt that his friend would one day be dead from either drugs or violence and all that he hoped (as his parents did) was that he wouldn't be caught in whatever trouble Billy had caused on his departure from his mortal coil.

"Howdy Neil, what have we got going on here today?" He suddenly heard from a voice behind him.

Neil turned around and his stomach dropped. Officer Graves was standing behind him. He could count on one hand the number of times he had been arrested by this particular cop for a variety of reasons, barely. Neil tried to mouth something, but nothing came out. After he was satisfied he wasn't going to get an answer, the officer walked over and picked up the two-thirds empty can of beer that Will had set down just a couple minutes before.

"Mister Dawes, I thought that you and I had a talk. I thought I wasn't going to be seeing you getting in no more trouble. What happened?" Graves asked.

Neil didn't say anything, but instead turned toward where Billy had gone. Predictably, Bill and the guy he was talking to pulled their best David Blaine impressions and vanished as soon as they got a whiff of blue. Now they were gone and here Neil was with two cans of beer.

It figures, Neil thought.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Sometimes silence can be deafening. Neil sat at the dinner table, poking at his untouched pot roast and mashed potatoes with his fork – not because he was particularly hungry, but because it gave him something to look at beside the disappointed looks his parents were giving him. His father had come and picked him up from the police station and drove him back home in his Mercedes Benz, wordlessly.

When they got home, his father very calmly and evenly told him to go upstairs to his bedroom and stay there until dinnertime. Neil nodded and walked up the stairs and closed his bedroom door behind him, flopping down onto his bed. He stared out the window after that, watching the ships moving into and out of the bay. Gradually the light slowly faded away. He didn't bother turning a light on, he just watched out the window waiting for tonight's inevitable talk with his parents about today's screw up.  
The talk never came.

Anaya and Korin were very quiet during dinner as well. Sensing that something happened today and not wanting to be the ones to incur their parents wrath, they kept to themselves and ate their dinner in near silence. But whatever Neil was expecting, it didn't come.

"Go on upstairs and get cleaned up." His father said, in his distressingly calm "angry voice."

The two girls got up and carried their plates to the kitchen.

"You too" his father said to him.

Neil just stared at him stupidly for a moment and then nodded slowly before standing up and following after his sisters to put his plate into the dishwasher and then go upstairs to bed.

He had gotten a short reprieve from whatever punishment was coming this time, but it would be a short one. His father only seemed to get angrier the longer he waited for something like this.


	5. June 21st

"Sweetheart, could you come on out here for a few minutes? We have something we want to talk to you about."

The request came from the hallway outside of Andy's bedroom after a brief tap on the door. Andy looked over at the door for a moment, wondering whether he should respond or just feign sleep and get out from having to deal with his mom and her boyfriend of the week, for a little bit longer.

The self-deliberation only lasted for a moment. "Yeah mom, I'll be right out," he said, reluctantly.

Finding out what the news was going to be was only a distraction. The only real reason he was going out there was to raid the kitchen and get something to eat. He had been in his room pretty much the entire time since he got home from his catastrophic trip to the lake the day before. Fortunately, between having his own bathroom, a mini-fridge packed with Dr. Pepper and his Xbox, it was fairly easy for Andy to shut the entire world out and stay inside his bedroom until he deemed it safe to venture forth again.  
Although he wasn't sure that it was safe, in fact he was almost sure that it wasn't, he got up and put a t-shirt on and walked out his door and down the hall.

In the living room, he found his mom who, at just after 11:00 am, looked to be only slightly toasted. She was sitting on the couch cuddled up to the grinning idiot of a man with the HEE-HAW laugh. He looked like a hippie that was still caught mostly unawares that the sixties, or even the seventies, had come to an end quite some time back. He had thick bifocal glasses through which he apparently still needed to squint to be able to see clearly. He had long and disgustingly greasy hair that was tied back into a ponytail with several rubber bands running down its length.

Andy's mother, on the other hand looked like what her last boyfriend referred to as "ten miles of bad road." She was only thirty years old and looked like she was easily fifty; the product of twenty years of smoking, drugs and alcohol. Her face was waxy and pockmarked; a quality that was accentuated rather than covered up by the copious amounts of makeup that found its way onto her face every morning.

Andy wasn't even sure if either of them had gotten any sleep, he heard them leave the house about six or seven last night – to go to a bar in Kingston, no doubt. Now they were sitting there both looking at him, grinning like the idiots that they both were.

"Come and sit down with us sweetie, we have something important to tell you." His mom said, smiling lopsidedly and patting the couch cushion nest to her.

Expressionlessly, he walked over to the couch and sat down next to them, awaiting whatever absurd thing they would have to tell him – and it turned out to be worse than he had thought.

"Sweetie" his mom started. "Gary just started working here at the gas station and he's going to be moving in with us."

Andy tried to keep his face as calm as possible, he didn't want to show his mom and Gary the obvious disgust that he felt at this news. But the lack of expression was obviously not what the two of them were expecting, making them both look troubled. Or maybe it was just confused.

Amy Verner continued on, using her own ninth-grade education to feel out her words and try to make her son accepting, if not happy, of her decision. "Sweetheart, I'm sure the two of you are going to get along. You both like fishing. Maybe you and Gary can go out this weekend and catch us something…"

Her voice tapered off toward the end, and Andy flashed with irritation. The last time that he had gone fishing was about two years ago, and even then it was something he insisted on doing by himself. He really wanted to explode at her, at both of them. He didn't though, he put on his best shit-eating grin and pretended he was okay with all of this, that he was okay with everyone in the neighborhood, Samantha included, getting a nice big eyeful of his slut mom's new boyfriend.

Taking his smile to be enthusiasm, or at least acceptance, the two adults smiled back a little more. The braying idiot laughed loudly, the sound feeling like cold spike driving into Andy's temples. But he didn't let it show.

Gary's laugh cut off and his eyes seemed to bug out a little, giving him an expression a little like a cat about to hack out a hairball. He covered his mouth and coughed a couple times and then spat a large wad into his hand that he wiped off on an old, used Kleenex on the coffee table.

Recovering, Gary talked a little hoarsely "I'll bring my fishing poles back with me when I come home (Andy cringed at him calling this place home) and we can go see if we can catch something this weekend. Are there any fish in that lake down the street?"

Andy knew that aside from a meager few catfish, there wasn't. "I'm not really sure, I guess we can find out."

"Okay my man!" Gary held out his hand, the same one he had just spat into to shake Andy. Andy's stomach did a slow, nauseous roll at the thought, but he took the hand and shook it anyway, trying not to show the revulsion on his face.

"Are you hungry, sweetheart? I was just about to make some breakfast." Amy Verner asked her son.

"Nah, I'm okay." Andy lied, getting up and walking into the kitchen.

He decided he would make do with just a couple of granola bars and a can of Dr. Pepper. His mom's idea of breakfast was usually underdone scrambled eggs, with which she drank beer. The smell of the two combined never ceased to make him nauseous. And since his stomach was already feeling a little bit delicate after his encounter with Mister donkey-laugh, Andy figured it would be best to opt out.

And then, with speed that was both remarkable and disquieting, the two went back to ignoring Andy's existence completely. Gary turned on the television and started watching Pawn Stars while Amy went into the kitchen and hawked up a wad of snot into the sink before she washed out a skillet and broke a few eggs into it.

Andy returned to his room and ate the granola bars on his bed quietly. He grabbed his backpack out of the closet, where he had expected to leave it hanging until school started back up a few months from now.

Detached and vacant, he was almost finished before he even realized that what he was doing was filling up his backpack with the clothes and toiletries necessary to get away from this house; to run away. The realization didn't trouble him. Quite the contrary, it excited him. Andy had never really seen himself as particularly brave or daring. The idea that he was about to say he had enough and get the fuck out of Dodge, or Pratt in his case, excited him to no end.

He had no problem at all saying to hell with this place and its entire people. 

"Who are you trying to fool?" a small voice inside his head told him, but he immediately buried that feeling back down.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Andy sat up against a tree with a blanket on the ground underneath him. The forest enveloping him was serene and calm. There were birds in the trees chirping and a little light wind rippled through the branches, making the leaves rustle gently. Although he was only about sixty or so feet off the road, he could easily make himself believe that he was in the middle of a great forest without civilization in any direction for possibly hundreds of miles. Only the rare car going down the road off to his left was able to break this illusion.

It would be dark before too much longer. Andy wanted to make a fire, but was too afraid that someone might be looking for him and didn't want the attention that the light this close to the road might give him. He wasn't completely sure yet where he was headed – he had covered maybe half the distance to Kingston today, about eight miles or so, and would make it the rest of the way tomorrow. After that, who can say?

He thought about going out to the west coast, California maybe. It was a romantic notion full of mystery and excitement, and at this point anything seemed possible as long as he was out of the suffocating and soul-killing quagmire of Pratt, Tennessee.  
And overall, things were going easy for him so far. He walked out of the house and right out of town without anyone even seeming to realize it. The part that made Andy the angriest and the saddest was the fact that he took his backpack and walked right out the door past his mom and Gary but neither of them even noticed that he was leaving. Part of him wanted to yell at them, to tell him he was leaving and never coming back again, (Aren't you going to try to stop me?) but he didn't. If they weren't concerned enough to notice him leaving, then he didn't want to be there anymore anyway.

Boredom was starting to get the better of him. No matter how excited he was and how beautiful the woods around him were, he gradually felt himself drifting off to sleep with nothing else to keep his mind occupied. He finally gave in wholeheartedly just as the sun was giving today's last gasps of daylight. He laid down on the old blanket (couldn't I have remembered to bring a pillow? He thought.) and fell into a deep sleep.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Andy awoke with a start and a gasp for air, his eyes opening wide. He jumped up to his feet as though they were spring-loaded. The forest that he was in was gone and instead he was in the middle of a cornfield. The sky above was a rich azure, darkening in the sunset. A warm summer breeze blew across the fields, causing the corn to ripple.

He turned his head to the side, thinking he could hear something – it sounded as though someone was playing a guitar. He walked toward the sound, pushing the tall stalks of corn out of his way with both hands. Just as he was thinking that someone must have been standing in the middle of the corn somewhere playing music, the field abruptly ended.

There was a simple ranch farmhouse sitting at the edge of the corn. A large tree grew over it with a tire swing tied to one of its lower branches. A trench had been worn in the ground beneath the swing from what surely could have been eons of use. Andy paid no mind to this; his attention was rapt on a black woman sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch strumming her guitar and singing.

What a friend we have in Jesus,  
All our sins and griefs to bear.  
What a privilege to carry,  
Everything to God in prayer.

The woman was old, almost ancient. Her skin was wrinkled and stretched across her bones, and there was nothing more than a think wisp of hair on the top of her spectacled head. She stopped her song and put her guitar down as Andy walked up, and he could see at once that there was wisdom in that face.

She smiled at him and leaned forward in her rocking chair.

"Hello Andrew," she said to him deliberately and slowly, her eyes studying him.

Andy looked confused, wondering how a place he had never been before could still seem so familiar.

"Who are you… and how do you know who I am?" He asked, at last.

"I'm Abby Freemantle, but the folks around these parts just call me Mother Abigail." And then with a smile: "I'm a hundred and six years old and I still make my own bread!"

Andy smiled despite himself, the woman's good cheer was infectious. And if this was all a dream, it was a good one, or at least a pleasant one. But it did occur to him that she didn't answer the second half of his question.

"What…what is this place?" Andy asked, looking around in curiosity and wonder. The place seemed like it could easily be out of a Norman Rockwell painting. He could feel the roughness of the porch rail he had his hand on, the old wood weathered from possibly a hundred or more summers.

"This is Hemingford Home, Nebraska, Andy. You're gonna come and see me real soon, you and all your friends. But for now you need to go back. There's someone you need to bring with you, someone you can't leave behind."

Andy shook his head, confused. "I don't know what you mean, I'm coming here, why?"

Mother Abigail didn't answer but instead looked past Andy to the corn behind him.

"It's not time yet to ask questions, time is short." She said and then pointed to the cornfield "There's rats in the corn."

Andy turned around and saw that, indeed, there were rats running all around at the base of the corn stalks, gnawing at them. He turned back around to ask her what that meant but the house and Mother Abigail were both gone. Instead he was looking at a pond.

Gone were the cornfield and the house and it gradually dawned on Andy that he was standing knee deep in the water at what looked exactly like Pratt Lake. Only this couldn't possibly be Pratt Lake, the water there was sometimes a little cloudy but it was usually clear. This water was dark and still, almost the color of ink.

With a shiver, he realized that the water was still even with the slightly chill breeze that was now coming in front the west. He couldn't even see the bottom of the lake. It was almost like…

No, he could see something down there. It was like there were two red stones, or burning embers there at the bottom of the lake bed. At first he didn't realize how he didn't see them the first time, but then it became clear that they were getting brighter, or maybe closer. A growing twist of fear grew in his gut when he realized that while they did look like burning embers, there was something that they looked even more like…

They looked like eyes.

Andy wanted to turn to run, but seemed gripped there in that spot as the eyes suddenly gained intensity like a blast furnace. They broke to the surface as part of a person, a misshapen faced monster with those searing red eyes. Andy became aware that a guttural scream was coming from his own throat as the thing grabbed him with its hands and slowly started to drag him under the water. He felt the horrible claws pulling him down into the inky blackness of the water. Despite his struggles he felt the cold of the lake wash over his face and suck him down into the darkness.

Very gradually, Andy became aware that he wasn't drowning – and if it were it would surely be from the sweat that was drenching his body and the blanket he was sleeping on. He sat up, shaking from the dream he had just had and looked around, the dark forest around him suddenly seemed like a fake, like a facsimile of what was reality. Both of his dreams seemed so real.

And then he was sure he heard that voice in his head again. "You're gonna see me real soon, you and all your friends."

Andy sat up and quickly stuffed his blanket and the rest of the stuff he had brought with him back into his backpack. Surely he wasn't about to head back to Pratt because on old black woman in his dreams told him to. No… that wasn't it at all, it was because he was a sensible person and this wasn't the way to go about getting out of that crappy town. He would find a better way, but in the meantime… it was time to go back.


	6. June 22nd

Across the country a huge game that looked very similar to tag was being played out, only the rules of superflu tag are much different than what you remembered from your childhood.

First, once you are it, anyone you even come close to has just been tagged – now they are it. Second, once you are it, you stay it until the game is over. And most importantly, there were absolutely, positively no winners. 

Sean Holt was a truck driver delivering frozen food to a Burger King outside of Columbus, Ohio. He was having a pretty good day, a situation that was going to change all too soon. He finished up his delivery easily enough and stopped to get the signature of the store manager who he noticed had a bit of a cough. Always the pleasant fellow, Sean told the manager that he hoped he felt better. The manager smiled and gave Sean back his clipboard. He also gave him the superflu.

Tag, you're it.

Sean traveled north along the expressway for a few miles and then decided to make a quick pit stop at a gas station. The three cups of coffee that he had drank this morning were seriously starting to catch up with him. After he finished taking a leak, he walked back to his truck and exchanged pleasantries with a bus driver who was himself going in to answer nature's call. This particular man was driving a bus full of girl scouts on a trip to a museum in Cincinnati. The moment he set foot back on the bus he sealed the fates of each of the forty-two girls on the bus. All of them would be dead before the week was out.

Tag, you're it.

Ron Hoff, the bus driver in question, made a quick stop at a tollbooth as he was getting off the Ohio Turnpike. Nancy Nagle, the matronly woman at the booth was fifteen minutes away from the end of her shift when she unwittingly joined our game. She collected twelve dollars, some change and the superflu from mister Hoff then wished him a good day.

Tag, you're it.

Nancy hummed to herself as she drove home from work. She made a tidy little mental note to herself of the half dozen errands that she needed to make on her way home. She even mapped out the most efficient path she could take to get to all of those stops with a minimum of wasted time in between. Because, as Nancy's friends would tell you, Nancy was a very efficient woman.

She parked her sensible little Camry beside the supermarket and took her movies back to the Redbox. She had just finished putting them back into the machine when she turned and found someone she recognized. She smiled and greeted her fourteen-year-old daughter's best friend, Rachel Delany. Rachel smiled back and although she seemed a little bit anxious and distracted, Nancy thought nothing of it as she went home to infect her family.

Tag, you're it.

Rachel, in fact, was anxious and distracted. She had missed her last period and was pretty sure that her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant despite his assurance that "you can't get pregnant the first time." She had stopped at the supermarket and was clutching a bag with a two-pack of pregnancy tests. She couldn't fathom why someone would need to take the test more than once, but they were on sale. Her fears would be confirmed an hour or so later after she took it secretly into her bathroom.

It would all be a moot point, however, her and her baby both would be dead in the evening of the 25th and the rest of her family would be gone on the 26th. Sadly, there would be no baby shower in Rachel Delany's future.  
By the end of the 20th of June, Sean Holt and the people he infected, and they people that they, in turn, infected would number a little over nine thousand. The number that those people would go on to infect the next day would be beyond count.

On and on the game of tag went, the only way out of the game was to stop breathing and it would become clear in the next week that a very, very many people were going to find their way out of the game.


	7. June 23rd

The small Pitts S-2B stunt plane zipped down the runway at almost a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Its landing gear picked up off of the ground and seemed to rest on a cushion of air just above the asphalt for a few moments before the plane pitched skyward, climbing high into the air.

The biplane was pristine. The candy apple red hull was shined and waxed to a mirror finish. Even the cockpit glass was so unmarred and perfect that aside from the reflection, it was almost as though it wasn't even there. The engine gave off a high pitch whine, courtesy of the supercharger firmly ensconced beneath the brilliant red fuselage. It sounded like an entire armada of enraged hornets shooting skyward to battle.

At the end of it's seven thousand foot climb, the plane pitched even further up into the air so it was traveling vertically. Simultaneously climbing and slowing, the steep climb brought the plane to a place where it seemed to hang in the air, unmoving for a moment before it pitched back down and made three quick and precise rolls as it dove directly down toward the ground, it's speed climbing from a dead stall up to over two-hundred miles per hour. Suddenly and deliberately, the plane pitched back up again. And flew through a pair of wide loops, the second of which had an impressive roll at its apex. The effect was breathtaking, the plane and it's pilot seemed to thumb their nose at a concept so archaic and irrelevant as gravity. Sir Issac Newton be damned.

Floyd Wilks' face was stiff and unmoving, as though it had been carved out of a piece of stone. The only discernible movement was his eyes that were constantly darting back and forth between the view outside of the canopy and the all-telling instrument panel just below it. Everything he was doing was so firmly ingrained in his self that he was relying on muscle memory to bring each maneuver to perfection. He made the hard stunts look easy, and the easy stunts look like nothing more than a walk along the beach.

And why should they not be? He had done all of these things while flying above Vietnam early on in his career and then again much later over Iraq. The only difference between now and then was the price tag on the plane and the fact that nobody was currently shooting at him. Flight was and had always been his life's true hobby, and he was a master of it.

After he had climbed back to a safe altitude, he snapped the stick to the right sharply and spun the plane into a dangerous, turning dive. Floyd pressed a button just above his right knee and caused a plume of smoke to exit from the back in a corkscrewing pattern as he spun through the steep descent. The corkscrewing became tighter and tighter the closer he got to the ground and then he finally broke out of the dive and leveled the plane out around two thousand feet above the tree tops below. The trail of smoke he left gave a queer resemblance to a tiny and stationary tornado climbing into the sky above him.

A little out of breath from the rising and falling g-forces on his body, Floyd decided that he would fly it straight and level for a little while. He relaxed his hold on the controls slightly and relaxed in his seat, just taking in the scenery and enjoying the flight for a while.

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

Floyd woke up with the sunrise that morning with the expectation that he was going to go with Derek to the hangar today and spend some time tinkering around on their planes. However, not long after he had started his newspaper and the morning's first cup of coffee, Derek came down the stairs from his bedroom and said that he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be able to join him today.

Derek had walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, his father looked at him. He was pale with two bright spots of color in his cheeks. 

"Are you feeling okay, boy?" Floyd asked.

Derek just smiled; the fatigue was evident in his face. "Yeah, I went to bed last night feeling like I was maybe coming down with something." He stopped to take a sip of his coffee. "It looks like I was right."

Derek then grimaced at the taste and poured a little bit of powdered creamer into the cup and then stirred it before taking a second drink. This one he seemed to find more to his liking. He carried the cup with him as he walked over and sat down at the table across from his father.

Floyd nodded. "While I'm gone today, you ought to make an appointment with Doctor Haskell. He will give you some antibiotics or something, that will have whatever you've got on the run by tomorrow morning."

This was a battle Derek was sure could not be won, the mechanical genius his father was aside, the man had a very dim and vague view of the medical arts. He was sure that there was nothing that a simple pill could not cure and the almighty penicillin was the mystical ambrosia that could cure anything. He was fairly positive he was having a bout of that flu that was going around. If so, it was just going to have to run its course and there wasn't a damned thing that any doctor was going to be able to do about it. But rather than argue this point with his dad, he figured that discretion was the finer point of valor.

"Sure dad, I'll give him a call today." He lied.

"Good, good. When you go there, tell him that I said 'hi.'" Floyd said. "Now is there anything you need me to pick you up when I get back from the field?"

"I don't think so." Derek said, "Amanda seems to have got everything pretty well under control. She's been shoving crap down my throat since I woke up. Vitamin C, these nasty tasting zinc lozenges and this stuff that I think is called euthanasia."

"Echinacea" Floyd corrected patiently.

 

"Whatever." Derek said, smirking. "I think she's back at her house right now making me up a pot of chicken noodle soup."  
"Hey, get used to it. You are marrying the girl," Floyd said.

Derek considered this for a moment and nodded. "Yeah dad, I know. I'm just not used to someone taking care of every little thing for me like this. It makes me feel pretty useless…I hate being sick."

"You are just used to having a dad that's always been pretty useless as a parent." Floyd admitted. "Taking care of people was always your mom's deal, not mine. That's why you grew up rebuilding aircraft engines and then flying them – it's the only thing that I've ever been really good at.

"Amanda's doing things right, she's taking care of her husband to-be."

Derek acquiesced and carrying his cup of coffee, he went back to his bedroom to try to sleep off the flu.

Floyd finished up his cup of coffee and walked outside through the back screen door, letting it slam behind him. He walked across the dewy grass through his own backyard and into the neighbor's. After the rain yesterday, it looked like it was going to be a really nice day; it already felt like it was in the mid-seventies and it wasn't even nine in the morning yet.

He walked up the back steps to Amanda's house and rapped his knuckles on the door frame a couple times before he opened the door and walked inside. He let the door close gently and looked around the steamy kitchen. It looked like Amanda had indeed been very busy; the kitchen was in a state of industrious chaos. Two pots were covered on the stove and the oven was on. The smell of simmering chicken noodle soup and baking bread was mouthwatering and made Floyd's stomach grumble in protest.

Not for the first time he wondered how it was that Amanda was so talented in the kitchen. He knew from past experience that her mother was an unmitigated catastrophe when it came to cooking anything that didn't have simple microwave instructions printed on the back.

"Amanda?" Floyd asked.

"In here!" The girls shouted cheerfully from the living room.

Floyd followed the voice and found her sitting on the couch, pulling articles of clothing out of a white plastic clothes basket and then folding them neatly before putting them in one of several tidy piles beside her. Her blond hair was caught up into a ponytail behind her and she was working furtively to the sound of an egg timer ticking away on the table in front of her.

How on Earth did this girl get so perfectly domestic? Floyd wondered, not unkindly.

"Derek's lying down for a while, I figured I'd come by and see how you are doing." Floyd said, looking around. "But it sure looks like you have everything under better control than I could ever hope to."

Amanda smiled at him sunnily and nodded. "I figured I'd make him some soup while I start getting the house together for my Mom and Dad to get back. They gave me a call this morning, I was going to tell them but I figured I should wait and do it face to face."

Floyd nodded and bent over to kiss the girl on the top of her head. "I have my phone on me if you need anything. Make sure that Derek calls Doctor Haskell today. The sooner he starts taking something, the sooner he is going to start feeling better."

Floyd turned back for the door and stopped after a few steps, looking back. "How are you feeling?" He asked.

Amanda shrugged. "I feel fine. I never get sick."

~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~

"Pitts on base to land zero-one-nine, if anyone's on approach or base then speak up." Floyd said, cutting back the throttle and extending the flaps on the little aircraft. After nobody responded to him he made a smooth and tight bank and lined himself up with the runway. He glided the plane in effortlessly and casually; he had landed on dirt strips and even fields of grass during his military career. The tiny Pitts S-2B came pretty close to landing itself.

"Clear of the runway" Floyd announced as his farewell to any and all that might be listening after he passed off of the runway and onto the taxiway back to his hangar. He was pleased with the work he had done on the plane, everything felt good – fantastic even. He was ready and looking forward to the air show coming up.

He steadily piloted the plane back along the concrete back to his hangar and then shut the plane down, taking off his headset and getting back out. The day was warming up pretty good; it was easily ten degrees hotter now than it was when he had first walked outside earlier that day. He shed his jacket and tossed it back into the plane along with his headset.

As he was pushing his plane back into its place in the hangar he looked over and noticed his son's rolling trash heap of a car sitting there in one of the parking spaces next to the hangar. Floyd had pretty much decided that he was going to buy his son and new daughter-in-law a new car as a wedding present. He would have to take a home equity loan out to pay for it, but it was worth it. If they were planning on starting a family together, they were going to need a car that could move without two or three hours of upkeep every week.

He was still examining his son's car as he got into his own and drove out of the airport. As he stopped and showed his ID card to the man at the gate, he noticed the gentleman had a bit of a sniffle. He thought very little of it until turned the news on after he had gotten back on the main road heading home, however. There was more talk about a flu epidemic, it seemed that his suspicion was right and he probably should go in and get a flu shot today. It couldn't hurt and just maybe he'd save himself the trouble of a bout with influenza, which is unpleasant all the time, but it's only that much worse when you have to live with it during the summer heat.

On this whim he pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and paged through hand found Doctor Haskell on his speed dial (it's best to always be prepared, Floyd thought) and pressed the send button.

The phone rang almost a dozen times, Floyd was about to give up and call back later when Trish, the doctor's secretary, answered the phone. He had known her for years, they had even briefly dated when they were in high school many, many years back.

"Doctor Haskell's office" she said, and then covered the mouthpiece that almost muted the deep, throaty cough.

"Hi Trish, this is Floyd Wilks. I've been hearing about this flu that's going around and I wanted to see if the doctor can give me a flu shot today." Floyd inquired.

"Sorry Floyd" Trish told, sneezing twice in the time it took her to get it all out. "The doctor is swamped with patients who all are down sick with this flu that's going around. I can pencil you in for next Thursday if that's okay with you?"

"Sure Trish" Floyd said. "Say, my son's been sick since last night, he hasn't been there yet today has he?"

"Derek?" Trish asked and then stopped to sneeze several times. "No, he hasn't even called in. Do you want me to make an appointment for him too?"

Floyd chuckled. "No thanks Trish, I just wanted to check. You have a good day. And you take care, it sounds like you might be coming down with something too."

"Thank you Floyd!" Trish said cheerfully and then hung up the phone.

It seemed to Floyd that everyone was getting sick, that town down south was still quarantined and there was even talk about martial law being declared there and the national guard moving in. Scary times, Floyd thought.


	8. Chapter 8

Neil Dawes and his questionable friend William Hayes pedaled up the street with a few of their other equally questionable friends behind them. In fact, he was slowly beginning to realize that the only person that was in the group that he wouldn't be better off to rid himself of was the girl that was riding her bike directly behind him. This girl happened to be the ineffable Cindy Kellerman. Cindy being, as we know, the current focus of dear mister Hayes intentions of "hitting that", so to speak.

Neil wasn't even supposed to be out of the house today, to be sure. After the unfortunate episode a few days earlier, his parents grounded him for two weeks and said he wasn't to even speak with William until this was all over. All in all, it wasn't as bad as he had thought; he feared some terrible punishment at least an equal to the rack or the iron maiden. However, his parents had only seemed worn down and disappointed in him, and somehow that made everything even worse.

Of course, in the late watches of the night while Neil was lying in bed, he swore that he was done getting into trouble. He swore that he was going to do whatever he needed to do to made his parents proud of him, even if that meant that he would have to forsake all of the friends he had made since moving to this shitty little stuck-up town.

His repentance was short lived, though. Any alcoholic would have told him that it's easy to swear off something when the temptation isn't right there in front of you. It's an entirely different thing when that particular temptation comes to the door and says, "Shit on you being grounded, com'on, let's go."

He had no excuses other than because his parents said he couldn't leave. And with his parents not home right now, that was the only thing he could say to William and that would place Neil under the fire of his friend's caustic ridicule.

And that is how Neil Dawes found himself pedaling up the hill toward the abandoned house that overlooked the bay. The two boys had met up with their friends Zack and Kyle – two identical twin brothers that shared William's lofty ambitions for getting themselves and others into trouble. And the two of them had, by some manner of dubious luck, befriended the new girl here in town and talked her into going with the four of them to go check out the Mendel House overlooking the town.

Predictably, the twins spent the afternoon having abuse heaped upon them by Will in his misguided efforts to impress the pretty Cindy Kellerman. Cindy, in the meantime, spent most of the trip talking to Neil. The two of them had quickly found that they shared a lot of the same interested, not the least of those being that they were both reasonably new to town and felt very uncomfortable and out of place there.

More than once he looked over and found Cindy smiling at him, he found that some times having dark skin was an enormous benefit; and this was one of them. Had he possessed the same pale white skin that she had, it would have been turning bright red at that moment. Had William understood the looks that were passing between the two of them, he would have immediately turned the focus of his ire to rest on Neil, but this was a subtlety that was lost on him.

  
  


**~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~**

  
  


The Mendel house had been abandoned for almost twenty years and like most large and ominous abandoned houses, it was the object of a certain amount of local folklore and superstition. Every new ghost story involving the old house became a little bit more outrageous and convoluted than the one before it.

What was known is that Doctor Thomas Mendel was an entrepreneur who brought his family to live in Oak Valley during the late seventies. He had made tens of millions of dollars, a sum that was worth considerably more then than it is now, and financed the building of the enormous mansion overlooking the coast. All of this money came from the invention of an artificial heart valve that the doctor had created and which was quickly tested and found safe to replace faulty biological ones.

Flush with money, Mendel started construction on the house and moved his family into it the following year. Then two things happened in the same year to absolutely devastate the Mendel family. The first was several lawsuits due to a fundamental flaw in the design of the heart valve which sent Thomas into bankruptcy. The second was the death of Thomas' daughter, Andrea.

Many of the stories told by the light of flashlights at the slumber parties of the well to do children of Oak Valley revolved around the death of thirteen-year-old Andrea Mendel. Some stories said that she had jumped out the window of her fourth floor bedroom window and killed herself in the house's driveway below. Other stories said that her father strangled her in her sleep after going insane over the loss of his fortune. Each new story was more unlikely and (the children thought) exciting than the one before that. The truth was, however, far more mundane – Andrea Mendel had died of childhood leukemia.

That didn't stop a brisk traffic flowing into and out of the house despite the fences and "no trespassing" signs that surrounded the property. There was no small number of teenagers that told stories about how they saw the ghost of Andrea Mendel walking around the upper floors of the mansion. And everyone had a friend of a friend who spent the night in the Mendel House and was never seen again. Conversely, it was fairly common for many of the same teenagers to go spend the night in the mansion after beguiling their parents into believing that they were someone else.

Such wasn't going to be the case for Neil Dawes and party today, thank you. The five teens only intended to go inside for a little while and look around before heading home. Neil especially wanted to cut this visit short, not wanting to be gone from home so long that his parents or sisters got home and found out that he was no longer there.

The five of teens parked their bikes outside the chain-link fence and one at a time went underneath it. A ditch had been dug underneath one place in the fence to avoid having to climb over the eight feet of chain-links with the barbed wire strung across it. The police would periodically come up the hill and fill in ditches like this and patch up the holes in the fence, but such entryways always appeared again within a few weeks.

William and the twins were the first one under the fence, crawling on their stomach underneath. Cindy decided to go next and Neil helped her as she slid feet-first on her back underneath. Halfway under, her shirt was caught on the bottom of the fence and pulled it up. Neil could clearly see the firm and girlish ivory-colored flesh of her stomach and the perfect almond-shaped navel set below it. She brushed her hand down and put her shirt back in place just as the lacy white fringe of her bra came into view.

Neil looked up, hoping that she wouldn't see the way he was looking at her. It was then he noticed that he wasn't the only one that saw what had happened. The twins had gone on to check out the front of the house but William was standing there looking down at Cindy lustfully – he looked as though he were starving to death and the red-haired girl was a candy bar.

He didn't pay much more attention to what had happened and followed Cindy under the fence and the five of them had entered the house. All of the doors and windows had been boarded up, but much like the fence developed holes in it, the boards found their way off of the doors and windows with the same speed and efficiency whenever there were no authority figures around to enforce trespassing laws.

Neil's house was affluent by almost any standards, but he was still in awe of what he saw before him. The entryway was enormous; it towered up three floors to the ceiling above. A long wooden stairway wrapped itself in a spiral up to a landing on the second floor and then another on the third. The effect would have been beautiful ordinarily, but the entire image was marred by the fact that almost every surface that was reachable by hand was covered in graffiti. The idea of gangs here was almost a joke, so the graffiti was free of gang markings and seemed to consist of such charming phrases as "Suck my cock, bitch" and "I fucked Emily Wilson right here".

The twins went running up the stairs, yelling like morons as they went. William, Neil and Cindy ignored them and passed through a door into what was probably, at one point, a dining room. This room was littered with beer cans, empty packs of cigarettes and the occasional used condom. (Something that William found incredibly funny and would not stop commenting about despite his companions' lack of encouragement.)

They walked through the house quietly, or rather Cindy and Neil were quiet and trying desperately to ignore Will's nonstop idiot babbling. He was speaking mostly to Cindy, trying to impress her with the inane and ridiculous bragging of exploits that undoubtedly never happened. When he did notice Neil it was with a malicious look in his eyes that seemed to say. "What the fuck are still doing here, you dumb nigger? Can't you see that I'm trying to get lucky?"

Neil ignored the looks just as he ignored the talk. He actually got a sort of grim satisfaction out of foiling William's every attempt to get Cindy alone, and the only thing he had to do so was be there. He could see the frustration slowly building up in Will; it was something that he had learned to recognize. Will had a way of blowing his top when he wasn't getting his way. It reminded Neil of when Donald Duck got angry, the red line would start at his feet and gradually work it's way up his body until it reached the top of his head and steam would erupt from his ears; causing Donald to start jumping up and down while ranting and raving in his quacking voice.

William's tantrums were humorously similar to Donald's, and Neil couldn't think of anything he'd rather have happen than for him to erupt like that and show the object of his lust exactly how immature and obnoxious he really was, if she hadn't figured it out already. The thought had already occurred to him that he was making a good friend in Cindy, a friend that he could be proud to have. Without even really looking, he had finally found a friend in town that his parents would approve of. And after only the events of the day he would dump William and the idiot twins in favor of this girl without a single regret.

His contemplation was interrupted by the sound of a crash and some yelling in a room off to the right. Thinking there was trouble, Neil sprinted off through an adjoining hallway in the direction of the noise; almost sure that someone had been hurt. He threw open a door into a smaller dining room to find that Kyle had crashed through a balcony railing and had fallen to the dining room floor below. He was rolling on the ground clutching his sides as his brother came running down the stairs laughing like a lunatic. Neil didn't even stop running as he went to his knees, sliding the last few feet to Kyle.

"Kyle!" He yelled, a little bit panicked. "Dude, are you okay?"

Kyle rolled over, his face red with laughter instead of pain. He was laughing so hard that he couldn't even catch his breath. Tears were rolling out of the side of his eyes, but to Neil it painted the illusion of someone who was seriously injured.

"Kyle, are you okay man?" Neil asked. "Come on, talk to me."

Kyle instead choked out a laugh and pointed at his brother who was laughing every bit as hard as he was.

"That was so fucking awesome." Kyle finally was able to gasp out.

Neil quickly realized what was going on. The twins had been clowning around up above and Kyle had broken through the railing. And with no more sense than he apparently had – the realization that they could have both been seriously hurt was completely lost on them. Instead, the two saw the near injury to be the peak of hilarity.

A little bit disgusted, Neil got up and left the two giggling teens behind and walked back to the empty room where he had abandoned William and Cindy.

"Sorry guys, Kyle fell over a…" Neil started but then grew silent when he saw Cindy being pushed up against the wall by William. She looked over at him; her face was a mask of abject terror. He looked further down and his eyes widened when he saw that her button-down shirt had been torn open and revealed the ivory flesh beneath.

He stared in shock for a moment before William yelled at him abusively. "You want to get the fuck out of here, asshole? We are busy."

Neil looked to Cindy whose eyes widened and her head shook imperceptibly.

Understanding what would happen if he were to walk out right now, or what would have happened had he not come back, Neil's vision suddenly became a haze of angry red. He closed the distance between William and himself not at a run, but at a casual and deliberate walk, his fists clenched beside him.

William jumped back away from Cindy and glanced around, possibly for a place to run to. (His belt was unbuckled, Neil noticed.) Not having anywhere to go he looked back in shock and horror just as Neil's fist clouted him in the side of the head. William grunted and fell to the ground, clutching his wounded ear. The shock was wearing off now and the surprise on his face was giving way to anger.

"Gonna kill you, nigger" Will said, his face a mask of hatred. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a butterfly knife and opened up the glittering silvery blade.

_He outweighs me by about fifty pounds,_ Neil thought. _If I let him get back up, he will kill me and there's not going to be a damn thing I will be able to do about it._

Rather than allow that to happen, Neil aimed another kick at Will's ribs. He connected with a meaty thud and heard all the wind leave William as he crumbled back to the floor, face down. Will looked up with his eyes bugging out, and his mouth opening and closing like a fish that had been plucked out of the lake on a fisherman's hook. His face turned apoplectic, making Neil wonder if he had broken a few of Will's ribs with that kick.

The mystery turned to certainty as Neil noticed, to his alarm, a growing pool of blood that was coming out from the bully turned gasping fish that was Will Hayes. Cindy must have seen it at the same time too, because she let out a little scream of panic and covered her mouth with both hands.

Will crumbled back to the ground and rolled into a catatonic ball, groaning as he did so. Neil, almost hyperventilating, kneeled down beside him and rolled him over with no small amount of effort. He was dimly aware that he could hear Cindy standing beside him repeating over and over her mantra of “ _Oh my God, Oh my God…”_

Looking down at Will, Neil became immediately nauseous. The obnoxious teenage boy who was only moments ago ready to rape Cindy Kellerman was now lying on the ground with his own butterfly knife protruding from the right side of his abdomen just below his ribs. His shirt was covered in blood and something else; a black oily substance that was welling up around the knife wound.

William Hayes' eyes were fixed and unmoving, his hands curled loosely around the knife that he had impaled himself on. His chest was as still and lifeless as the Mendel House itself had been for the last couple decades.

"Cindy" Neil heard himself say numbly. "Oh God, Cindy. I think he's dead, I think he's dead…I killed him."

Cindy let out a pinched shriek, kneeling beside Neil and sobbing. He could feel the girl's arms around him, but the only thing that was registering in his mind was William's hands clutching at the knife that ended his life. He inhaled sharply as he opened his own hands to find them covered in blood, probably from when he rolled Will onto his back.

His mind was racing; he was going to be blamed for this. It didn't matter what Cindy said, or what Will was going to do; either way, he was going to get blamed for this. Even if they just left here, the twins would say what happened and about suppertime the police would be knocking at his door and tell his parents that he killed someone. He could say it was self-defense, but was it? How could he prove that?

_I am completely fucked._ Neil thought, _the only way that I'm not going to go to jail over this is if I…_

"Run" Cindy said.

Neil looked at her, her eyes were still shell-shocked but her voice was calm. "You have to run, I don't want to see you go to jail. You kept him from hurting me."

Dimly he could hear the twins screwing around somewhere else in the house, oblivious to what was going on a floor or so below them. Cindy would tell the police what happened and paint as pretty of a picture as she could to keep him from getting into trouble. But for right now he needed to…

"Run" Cindy said. "Please."

Her eyes were pleading with him and finally he nodded to her. The two of them rushed outside and Neil started toward the fence but was caught by Cindy's hand. She turned him around and, standing on the tips of her toes, she kissed Neil on the lips. His eyes opened widely even as hers closed, he had never kissed a girl before and this one caught him completely by surprise.

When their lips parted she opened her eyes again, hurt and sorrow were evident within them. "Thank you." She said.

Neil smiled slightly, but couldn't seem to get any words out so he only nodded. He turned and crawled through the ditch running under the fence and glanced at her one last time before he got onto his bike and rode away. He would never see Cindy Kellerman again.

 


End file.
